Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi Experiments With A Genderless World

Gabrielle Calvocoressi explores a genderless world in her new poetry collection, “Rocket Fantastic.”

Credit Courtesy of Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi has become less and less comfortable viewing the world through the prisms of sex or gender.

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A conversation with poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

This works out OK for Calvocoressi’s personal life where the poet encourages people to just use the name Gabrielle instead of “she" or "her."

But exploring a genderless world was a little trickier to do in writing poetry, so Calvocoressi worked with editors to come up with a new option, the musical segno symbol that Calvocoressi tries out in the new collection “Rocket Fantastic” (Persea Books/2017).

The symbol stands in for personal pronouns and allows readers to engage with the poem’s content while leaving sex and gender as an open question. Calvocoressi’s collection explores the lives of people and animals whose individual stories may seem small, but when taken all together, explore questions of violence, grief, nature and familial relationships in the modern era.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Calvocoressi, professor of poetry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the new collection.